Back to Blog
Brave merida rule 346/3/2023 ![]() Let’s go back to the case of Brave, where marriage is for political purposes. Need health insurance or other financial benefits tied to marriage.Even with this love ideal, there are other reasons people get married: It is only recently that love has been promoted as an ideal reason for marriage (read Marriage, A History for more). What we see here is an alternative purpose of marriage, that is, marriage for political reasons rather than for love. To find the best prince they hold an archery contest and even then, Merida shows them up as the best archer among them all. Love is not a prerequisite for this marriage. She is not interested in marriage and the men presented are, well, dolts. She is to marry one of the princes of the other three clans in order to keep the peace among the four clans. ![]() The gist of the film is that it is time for Merida to get married. ![]() I saw the film on Friday and instead of rehashing how Brave reinforces gender stereotypes, I am going to focus on the marriage in the film. In the end, ( SPOILERS!) Merida rescues her mom and herself rather than needing the rescuing (if you ignore the part where she needs her three younger brothers to help her escape from her room in which her dad locked her). At least she doesn’t wear pink or long for prince charming or needs to be rescued by prince charming, so there was some deviation from the princess trope. Much has already been written about Brave as yet another princess movie with the untapped potential of actually crushing gender stereotypes. In the Pixar movie Brave, which opened last week, the heroine is a young woman named Merida who is, of course, a princess. I’m actually not sure why Merida is even a princess except that the story is set it in medieval Scotland (and now she can be added to the Disney princess line-up and not be relegated to the sidelines like Mulan). ![]() Pixar finally released a film starring a female lead! In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explains how there are many reasons for marriage as illustrated in the film, Brave. Why do people get married? Love, right? Maybe not. Originally published at Sociology in Focus on June 27, 2012
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |